`I'll be on my guard until next week'

Two students lounged in shorts and sandals, a harried mother pushed a cart overloaded with suitcases, and a pair of middle-aged men bent against the weight of the duffel bags slung over their shoulders.

And when the woman in the navy blazer behind the counter leaned over and called out, "Does anyone feel unsure about taking this flight today?" no one nodded or made a joke or stepped up to speak with her. They just waited, in resigned silence, to check in for Flight 296 to London.

In a country where the war against terror is, for many people, marked only by the yellow-ribbon magnets they see on passing cars and the awkward, sock-clad hustle through the airport security line, the news of the bombings Thursday in London was a jab at an old wound, a fresh jolt of the dread and pain that gripped the United States after Sept. 11.

But amid the shock and sympathy, it seemed clear that, following similar attacks in Madrid last year and Bali in 2002, many Americans have simply learned to live with the persistent threat of terrorism, or at least to say they do.

It may have helped that this attack didn't occur on American soil. Or that it appeared to be linked to a specific event, the Group of 8 summit in Scotland. But on Thursday, the stock market recovered from its early morning dip. The subway cars stayed full. Vacation plans went unchanged. Life went on.

Perhaps some people sat in a different train car than usual, like Sean Muellers, a 28-year-old bank examiner in New York who decided to switch seats after conducting a Google search of "how to survive a suicide attack" and learned his chances were better in the front car.

Or, like Sandra Coffey and her son Lucas, from Austin, Texas, who reconsidered, as they waited at O'Hare, a trip checklist that had included a ride on the London Eye observation wheel overlooking the River Thames.

Maybe they paid more attention to who got on and off the bus or if someone had left a bag behind on the train platform.

Around the country, though, most people recited similar scripts of resilience:

"We can't let the bad guys get us down," said security guard Jose Gonzalez as he hurried toward his Metro train in L.A.

"You can't walk around scared all the time," said Joan Sumpter, who rode a chartered bus with her church from Lane, S.C., to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta.

"I am going to go on living my life," said elementary school psychologist Ellen Magit, who plans to leave Chicago's North Shore on Tuesday for a trip to Spain.

Magit and her husband have talked about avoiding public transportation while in Spain but decided not to change their travel plans despite a plea from her daughter to cancel the trip.

`No rhyme or reason'

"I guess my feeling is that there is no rhyme or reason to when or where there are terrorist attacks," she said. "I would be in as much danger in downtown Chicago as in downtown Madrid."

It is, some experts say, inevitable that life, even amid the threat of violence, eventually returns to its normal rhythms and that fear recedes from a pang to a faint, persistent buzz.

"You take your first trip downtown and nothing happens, then you take another one and stay a little longer and that goes well, so you take a third," said Alvin Rosenstein, a professor at Adelphi University's School of Business in Garden City, N.Y. "As we get more experiences, it reinforces our feeling that all is safe."

That cycle has become so familiar that tax attorney Scott Irvine, riding the Washington Metro subway from his home in Virginia, could predict his own reaction.

"I'll be on my guard until next week," he said. "Then complacency will set back in."

On the CTA, commuters still leaned against the columns to read the newspaper. A street musician sang in Spanish on a platform, his voice drowned by the roar of the trains. A mother dozed in her seat, holding onto the handle of her toddler's stroller.

Flight attendant Michele Ebert, on her way to O'Hare to work a flight to Europe--she wouldn't say where--didn't expect to see much reaction from her passengers.

"It was different right after Sept. 11," she said. "They were more quiet. Reserved. Looking around and keeping to themselves."

At Frosch Travel Duet in Deerfield, which employs 45 agents, there were no cancellations on Thursday.

"No hubbub at all," said Janet Hyman, regional vice president. "It's just a new way of life. The mindset is different today.

"After Sept. 11, you had two kinds of people: those who would never travel again and those who realized that this was the way life was going to be ... with these little burps that come up in between," she said.

At the American Council for International Studies in Boston, which runs educational programs for about 21,000 high school students a year, there were fewer phone calls from concerned travelers than following previous attacks.

Only one person canceled an upcoming trip, said Nick Atkinson, council vice president, and about a dozen more called the office Thursday to ask about precautions for upcoming trips. The group's London travelers will stay off public transportation for the foreseeable future and will take private charter buses from the airport and on sightseeing tours, he said.

"The people we have talked to have been cool, calm and collected and wanted to find out what we have been doing," he said.

Just because people say they continue to go about their lives doesn't necessarily mean they are, warned Dr. Carl Feinstein, a child psychiatrist at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University.

`Damage our society'

"I think people can say they just go about their business, but how they respond to this constant threat of random terror is going to be different than what they say," Feinstein said. "When people are frightened, they band together and are very suspicious of outsiders. It's going to damage our open society."

And, of course, not everyone could anticipate complacency on Thursday. Some, like Marsha Kight Kimble, knew all too well the pain of the family and friends of the victims in London.

Kimble's daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing a decade ago. She got chills Thursday, she said, thinking of the survivors in London. "They're just at the beginning of their journey," she said.

"After the [Oklahoma City] bombing, the country came together, but it didn't take long for people to go back to their normal lives," she said. "Yet, mine had changed forever."

Others, like Rita and Bill Strugnell, were feeling a particular kind of dread for the first time.

The Strugnells were on their way home to London after a week's vacation in Chicago. They heard news of the bombings over breakfast Thursday morning and instead of taking a final outing to the beach, called friends and family in London to make sure they were safe. Bill Strugnell works for the London Underground, one station away from the site of the one of the explosions, they said.

The couple arrived at O'Hare Airport 3 1/2 hours before their flight, wearing sunglasses and expressions blank with shock.

"It's going to be . . . ," Bill said, then paused and looked up at the ceiling. " . . . I don't know. Sadness."

"I think there's going to be a cloud hanging over the city," Rita concluded. "I think it's going to take a long time to get over it."